The Walking Dead: Winter Chronicles
by Matheus H. Macedo
Summary: Far North of the survivors we know, another group fights to live, with each other and the dead. New characters in different heart breaking circumstances. The narrator recalls the story of what happened to him and his group from a type writer, a year after the outbreak.
1. Chapter 1: Two Feet of Snow

_CHAPTER ONE: _

_TWO FEET OF SNOW_

Things have changed. I guess you know that. But not just in the obvious way. Some people accept the way things are now and I guess that's the easiest way to survive. I wish I was like them, but I'm not. Things are different in us, the survivors. A shitty day used to mean a lot of things, none of which mattered in the least. And awful day- that's what you said if someone died before their time, or even after. Grandma died, that was 'an awful day' that was the what used to be normal. But today death is commonplace, and if your best friend is bit by a walker and you have to put a bullet in him, that's just a another shitty day.

My name couldn't be less important, so lets just put that out of our heads right now. What is important is that before it happened, before awful became shitty and shitty was standard, I was on my way to being a writer. I guess that's why I'm doing this now. So if you're reading this it's because I'm dead and I thought someone should know what happened to us. Maybe it will make a difference. Maybe you'll appreciate your companions more than I did mine.

I've been snowed in for the past month, supplies are low. Everything's low. There's not use trying to trek the snow, not unless you want to freeze to death. Though that may be a good way to go, especially since hungry walkers trying to eat me would just break their teeth instead. The truth is I won't survive the week. Every ounce of energy I have is going into writing this. Some of us will do what we have to to survive. That's not me. It was once, but now I want us _all _to survive. And the only way to do that is to tell a story and hope people learn from it. This place won't be secret for long- a big house in the middle of nowhere, in the spring this will probably be a territory worth killing for, my words will be found eventually, but for now it's a tomb. And this is my last will and testament.

I guess I can skip the first few months, the only people who don't know what happened that day are those who are still too young to remember it, and this is not a story for children. By the third month I had lost everyone I had known before it started. That's not to say they all died exactly, some I really did just _lose_. My sister, for example, she was a financial adviser for a fortune five hundred company in London, but she traveled almost daily. I think she was in the Netherlands when it started here. I don't know where it began really, it seemed to be everywhere all at once. But phones went down pretty soon and I'm ashamed to say I called an ex before I called my sister, and one call is all you got.

I used to call her Bambi so I'll use that name here. I don't want you to try and piece me together. The author is not the story here. Matter of fact, I'll change everyone's names so you can't blame what happened on just our group. It's what could happen in any group if they're not careful.

Bambi and I were what was left of our family after the divorce, our mom left us when she left our dad. We never forgave her, but then again she never gave us reason to. We were left with a drunk who among other things liked to take his failures out on his children. My sister learned quick that to live outside his rule she'd have to be successful in something. We never had money, so she chose that. Community college and a few math scholarships later she was on her way to a well paying job as an assistant a year after graduation. She moved up the ladder pretty quick, all she had to do was show her bosses that what they were doing was wrong how they could make more money if they followed her advice and it was off to the races for Bambi.

She felt bad about leaving me, like she had inherited some abandoning gene from our mom but I told her to go and live her life, I would graduate soon and by the time I did she would have a place big enough for both of us to share. She'd be traveling most of the time but that just meant I'd pay half the rent on a place I basically had for myself. But when graduation came she was too hot to stop, she had a place in Paris she couldn't give up- living in France was her dream since she was young, and even then she was never there long enough to enjoy it. I told her it was okay, that we would meet up when she came stateside but that turned out to be once or twice a year at the most. She sent me money whenever I was too broke to decline, and she called at least once a month. I can't blame her for succeeding, and I wouldn't want to even if I could. The honest to goodness truth is I was so proud of her for doing what she did, for keeping her head down and just doing the work- for enduring our father until she didn't have to anymore, that I was just happy that she was living the life she'd set for herself. And in a way I was too. I had a studio apartment in downtown Manhattan. I felt like Holden Caufield on his mini vacation after being thrown out of school, or one of Bukowski's barflies. I was living on my own above a bar that never closed, I was smoking cigarettes in my room and staying up all night writing pages and tossing them as soon as I wrote 'The End.'

These are the things that make a writer happy. Not that I was a real writer. More like a professional imitator of styles. If I was in the mood for poetry I'd look at some E.E Cummings and do my best to steal everything he'd written, someone thought I had some potential and paid me an advance to write some generic pieces about being young in the city. I gave him three thousand words on the importance of writing a grocery list before going shopping. I was five hundred dollars in the hole but I didn't care. Debt was just a part of what being a young writer in the city's all about. And that's how it was for a while, just me and my thoughts.

Then, one day, I got a call from a friend I'd known in school. She lived upstate and had asked me to come to her wedding. I didn't even know she was engaged but I told her I'd love to come. I wrote three ten pages essays in an many days for some friends who were going to N.Y.U for the tuxedo money and a graduation speech for the car rental. It had been a long time since I had driven a car- I relished it.

I couldn't get a convertible but I'd been making do with what I had my whole life. What's a convertible compared to a thoughtfully over compensated sound system? I swear just one hour on the road and my throat was fire-red and scratchy from singing full volume by myself. I spent a quiet night at a roadside motel, I guess that could have been when it all started. I was so tired from the road that I didn't even turn the TV on. The next day I knew I'd probably just barely make the ceremony if I left as soon as soon as I got up so I got fully dressed before leaving. I was dreading the conversation with the hotel manager- "Why're you in a tuxedo? Are you queer 'er some'in?"

But when I went to check out there was no one there. I looked around but I couldn't wait much longer so I wrote down my name and credit card number on a notepad and left. I accidentally took the pen with me- when I got to the car I almost went back to return it. I decided they probably had plenty of pens, plus I was pretty pissed about not getting any service and feeling justified for having paid at all when I could have just left, the idiot never asked me for an ID or card or anything when I came in, he was almost too drunk to hand me my key. As it turned out, the decision about not returning the pen was what saved my life. And if you think too much on things like that- _well if I just did that, _or, _if I didn't remember to do this-_ you'll drive yourself mad. Alive is alive is alive. And that's all there is to it. I said I wouldn't go into those first few months but, I guess if I'm to tell you the whole story I should start at the beginning. It was still summer, the hottest I remember. In certain situations, the same questions comes up time and time again, in prison it's _what are you in for?_ Now, when you meet someone new and it looks like you're going to be in the same group for a while you ask "Who was your first kill?" but I always lied. I told anyone who asked that my first kill was the motel manager- the one I never saw after I checked in. I only told the truth once, to a girl named Emily. My first kill was a woman, a mother. And she had her children with her.


	2. Chapter 2: All Dead

_CHAPTER TWO:_

_ALL DEAD_

The car sat leaning half on the asphalt and half on the grass. I drove past it not thinking much- someone probably had to pee or got car sick and had to puke. As I drove by I saw two leaning heads in the car, one in the front seat, one in the back. It gave me pause but not much, not until I saw the little boy sitting alone on the breakdown lane a few hundred feet down the road. I looked at my watch- I don't know why, would I have driven right by if I was late for the wedding? I'd like to think not but that was so long ago, I can barely put myself back into the mind of someone who had weddings to attend and a watch to keep track of time.

I pulled the car over- the boy was instantly afraid of me. If I'd know what he had just seen I wouldn't have been so crass. I didn't yell at him, I knew something was wrong but all I could think of was being where I had to be.

'Is that your mom in that car? Is she okay?' he just looked at me, shaking like a leaf. I wondered if his mother had had a heart attack or stoke while driving- but he wasn't sad or confused, there was just an empty awe in his eyes. Shock. I couldn't tell at the time because I didn't know what that looked like yet. I slipped the cell phone from my pocket as I started to walk towards the car. I got about ten feet away before I saw the blood. I dialed 911 before I knew what I was really looking at. The number was busy. I couldn't believe it, how could it be busy? Then- she moved. Her eyes had already begun to fade. There's no explaining it. The way you feel when you see one. First you think maybe she was beaten up. And then you get closer and- maybe it's rabies? And then you get close enough to see it. To smell it. It can't be. You look around for a hidden camera but there isn't one. There are only trees and wind and a scared little boy. After you see enough of them the shock of it drains away, but the pit in your stomach, the thing that tells you something's wrong with the world, that's always there. No matter how many you kill, something's always off about the world now.

The woman scratched at the window. She wanted to get at me, more than anyone has ever wanted anything. The little girl sat stiff in the backseat. Her hair matted in blood and brain. Her mother had started with the throat and somehow had enough force to break the girl's skull and tear out what was inside.

The door popped open and the woman spilled out to the road in front of me. I jumped back- there was a car coming in the distance. He was doing about a hundred miles and hour and the fact that I was in the way didn't seem to make a difference. The little boy saw his mother- the monster that used to be his mother- and ran. He took off into the woods by the side of the road and as much as I'd like to say we became roadside companions, that I was like a big brother who protected him from all things big and scary- the truth is I never saw him again.

I kicked the woman's face so hard I felt her cheekbone crack under my boot- it didn't even faze her, she grabbed my leg and I fell- the SUV swerved- missing my head by no more than a single inch. The pen dropped from the jacket pocket of my tuxedo and in a move I've mastered since: I jammed it through her eye into and soft sticky parts inside. She fell, dead. Actually dead.

I lay there, elbows up on the road waiting to wake up. If not for the smell to convince me this was real, I may still be there, lying on the road waiting for the nightmare to be over. Maybe if I'd gotten up I could have still found the boy. Maybe. Maybe not.

The next few minutes are a blur. I know I sat in my car for what could have been hours before I had to strength to turn it on and drive. I think about that boy a lot now. But at that moment, my mind was a blank. It was as if I'd just turned the power of thought off. When the fog wore off, I turned on the radio. That's when I knew the magnitude of what was happening. The reporter said New York was gone, they were everywhere. He could hear the screaming from the helicopter hundred of feet in the air. I remembered Liz. She was the first and only girl I had ever really been in love with. Still was if I'm being honest. I called and as soon as she answered she asked for help. She was still in Manhattan and trapped in her apartment. She told me that everyone in her building was turning into these things. But I couldn't help her. I was hours away and even if I did get to the city, I could never had made all the way to her building. So I sat there in my car and listened to her cry. She'd already tried to call her family. Mine was the only phone call that had actually gone through she said. She hid in the closet when they broke the door down. The next few minutes were silence. I told her I loved her. I whispered all the sweetest things I could think of to say. It sounds stupid now, but at the time it was all there was. She said she saw a cab driver eaten in front of her- she saw others being torn to shreds. She begged for a different fate. She kept repeating it to someone who wasn't there- "Please don't let them eat me."

After a few moments I said the only thing I thought would help her. "Jump." I whispered into the phone. I couldn't believe I'd said it. It didn't even sound like me. But suddenly her breathing slowed. I heard her whisper back, 'Okay..." and like any conversation, we ended it by saying goodbye. The phones didn't work anymore after that.

I drove on the empty highway for the better part of the day. It had been six hours since I left the motel. In those six hours I found out I wasn't a hero. I wasn't brave. I was just like anyone else who had their back against the wall. And I thought about that boy, running from his mother, leaving his dead sister behind, and how much he needed someone good and strong to help him but what he got was me.

Before I could let it sink in, I saw something. At first I thought they were walkers, I hadn't thought about what I would do if I ran into any more- and now realized I truly had no idea. I ever wanted to do what I had done with that woman on the road again. As I got closer I saw it was three people waving their arms to me- I thought about driving on, I didn't think I could talk to anyone ever again, the shame of what I'd done was so palpable to me it felt like I'd fallen into sewer water and anyone near by could smell it. I wiped the tears I didn't realize were streaming from my eyes and pulled over. That's when I met my first companions. The leader was Spencer. He had a bloody white undershirt beneath an open blue button up. He introduced the mousy teenager behind him as his girlfriend Emily. She seemed too young to be with him- it didn't occur to me until days later how unfocused I must have been to be thinking about that and not the blood on Spencer's shirt or the chunks of bone in the tire-iron he carried.

Ryan didn't speak, no one spoke but Spencer. He asked for a ride though truthfully he was only being polite, if I'd refused I wouldn't have survived to argue. Ryan was in a daze. He couldn't have been older than twenty but I never did find out. They piled in, Spencer told me to turn around. I hadn't realized it but I was still driving towards the wedding.

'Good thing you ran into us, that way's all dead.' Spencer took a gulp from the water bottle Emily was carrying and offered it to me. I took it. I was just this side of shutting down entirely- the water helped. We drove by Spencer's directions. He and Emily grew up around here, he took us down a dirt road which splintered from the highway and into the woods. There was a campsite near Lake Sky. I was just about out of gas so the thought of hunkering down someplace seemed best, at least until the military took over. His words echoed in my absent mind as we traveled the dirt road to the lake.

All dead.

But what really turned my stomach to knots was the _way_ he said it. Like it there was a flood, like the thing keeping us from being on our way was just something that happens. Something natural.

"What is it? Do you know?" I asked him.

"Rapture..." He said, "Gotta be."

I didn't argue. Didn't know that I could. That woman's face had burned like a brand in the back of my eyelids. She wasn't rabid, she wasn't angry, she wasn't even there. She'd died but her body kept working. This guy was saying it was the Rapture, and that was as good an explanation I was ever going to get.


	3. Chapter 3: Killin' is Livin'

_CHAPTER THREE:_

_KILLIN' IS LIVIN'_

There wasn't much to the camp site, it was mostly just a clearing with a few benches and tables set up by the lake. But we were grateful for the clean water and fire-pits. There were also two abandoned tents- Spencer reckoned whoever was staying here had heard about the 'commotion' and took off looking for their family. There was also the possibility that they were whisked off to heaven before anything bad happened to them, _'Only if They's good Christian of course.' _Spencer'd told us. By the looks of the tents, I'd put my money on the former. One leaned crooked and bent almost trampled, the other flat on the ground with dirty boot prints running across, fully trampled. And there were supplies left behind all over the place. Power bars and hiking gear, fruits and Nalgene bottles. Good Christians don't leave their stuff scattered out like that, people in a panic do. I didn't have to ask before Spencer offered an explanation for his still being here.

"I don't think the big man upstairs would take me out of the game when there was so much I could do. That'd be like benching your star quarterback before the game even starts. Plus. I'm Christian, but I ain't exactly good." He said with a wink and a smirk.

My first instinct was to fill up the bottles and ration the food for the week. I knew the military wouldn't be able to clear things up for at least a month or two- not after what I had heard from New York. Spencer's first instinct was to make weapons by breaking the benches and tables and marrying them to the metal skillets in the fire-pits. It made me think of Lizzy in her apartment, about what she'd seen that cab driver go through and how she dreaded it to the point of suicide. I told Spencer I agreed, weapons first.

There was something about the uncertainty of those first few days, I can still feel it- I remember looking up to the clear blue sky above and feeling like the earth had already died and we were the left over bacteria feeding off the corpse. Yeah, now that I think about it, those first few days were hard. And easy would never come again.

We slept in half hour shifts, whoever did the most work during the day, either hunting or searching for fire wood took the first shift to rest. Anyone dealing with the fox-holes (that's what we called the 'bathroom') would take the night off entirely. On this particular day that was me. You'd almost looks forward to that stench, it meant you were sleeping a full four hours. Where once four hours had been a complete drag, now it was a blessing. I was about two hours into the deepest sleep in four days when I heard it. The dead. Their throats push out a lulling droll, it's impossible to mistake it with anything but the vocal chords of something that shouldn't be making any sound at all. The first came at me through the tent- he clawed at the fabric trying to rip his way through. I jumped up and ran out to the rest of the group- Emily sat against a tree, makeshift weapon in hand. She'd fallen asleep on watch. The dead thing rose from the tent and stumbled toward me quicker than I thought they could- I snatched the two by four from Emily's hands and drove the metal pick we'd stuffed inside it through the walker's frontal lobe.

Emily woke up with a start- her hands prickled in splinters. For a moment she looked at me like I was a madman. Then it dawned on her. What had happened- what was still happening. Spencer woke up and raised Ryan, they rushed to the cache of weapons and armed themselves. Ryan tried his best to pretend he wasn't about to shit himself.

There were only three left but in those early days that seemed like a lot. One was still fresh, still strong, those are the biggest priorities- Spencer must have seen him too because before I do anything he'd already knocked that one down and put a boot through his skull. The others must have turned when it all started because their skin has begun to dry and rot. Spencer hammered his bat down and blew one of the thing's head's open like a water melon. I did my best to swing as hard as possible for a one hit kill, there's nothing I hated more than having to bash their heads in repeatedly- it didn't go my way. It growled at me and reached, its teeth baring like a shark's. I hit it in the head over and over until it finally popped. Spencer thought it was cute how hard I was working to kill just one. "It's not that easy for me. A month ago the thought of bashing someone's brains in never would have crossed my mind." I said between breaths.

"Things are different now, killin' is livin'" he said, and though I didn't want to admit it, he was right. Killing was a part of life, and the more I wanted to fight that fact, the least likely I was to survive. But I dreaded being in a group with someone who so easily accepted this fact- and the worst part was, because of his callousness, Spencer was the most useful member of the group. That simple fact raised a number of philosophical questions I didn't have time to think about- at least not right then. When it was all over and the area was clear, Spencer came upon on Emily so fast I thought there was a walker near by- he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed.

"You could've killed us!" he shouted and pushed her against the tree behind her. For a moment I was quiet, I knew I couldn't beat him in a fight and reasoning was out of the question. Then I remembered the boy running into the woods and I thought about how he would probably be here right now if I had been brave. I pulled Spencer's arm down- Emily collapsed to the ground, eyes watering, neck bruised, "We can't turn on each other, she fell asleep, it was a mistake, it won't happen again."

He towered over me breathing hell fire from his narrow nostrils. I knew he was still hot from the fight and the pumping blood in his veins fueled his rage- I gripped my weapon tight, then he dropped his.

"Fine. You're on watch then." He said and went back to his tent, but before he got in he called out- "Emily!"

The tiny girl jumped up an ran after him still rubbing her neck. Ryan walked past me in silence and fixed the fallen tent. "I'll take next shift" He said and went to sleep.

The next day Spencer gathered us all for a meeting. Emily's right eye was black and swollen. It was like living at home again. She was like Bambi, the way she looked to the ground whenever his eyes glossed over to her- the way she only nodded whenever he asked her opinion on something, anything.

"How'd that happen?" Asked her. She looked at me with surprise. No one really addressed Emily direct, you had to go through Spencer first. I knew she wouldn't respond. And I knew what the answer was. But I asked anyways, so it wouldn't be ignored, so Spencer knew it wouldn't be ignored. Like I said, I couldn't take him in a fight, and if he decided it was my time to leave the group I wouldn't have much of a choice. So a seemingly normal question was the only way to get us both on the same page without me signing my own death certificate. Emily only watched as the earthworms dig. Spencer looked at me like I was the guy who tells you the item you're buying costs more than you have.

"Happened in the scuffle." He said. A lie was more interesting than the truth, it showed he know it was wrong and that he cared what we thought of him. "This camp ain't safe enough. We either gotta make it safe or go somewhere else." He scanned mine and Ryan's face for a reaction. The truth is he was right and I told him so. That's all he needed.

Today we would gather up food and anything we needed to head out. Tomorrow we'd be on our way. That night I took first watch, I sat out in the dirt staring at the stars thinking about the future. Living in a world like this would only make a guy like Spencer worse. I knew my time with him was limited. It didn't matter how useful he was when shit went down, if he couldn't control his temper, he was a liability. I wasn't going to let what happened to my sister happen to someone else, especially someone who depended on me to survive just as much as I did on her. But Spencer wasn't leaving Emily, and he wasn't leaving the group, neither was I. Those thoughts soaked in my head until Ryan came to do his shift. As I lay in my tent waiting to go to sleep, I had one very clear idea in my mind, one that stayed until my brain shut itself off from exhaustion. Sooner or later, I was going to have to kill Spencer. And knowing what I know now, it should have been sooner.


	4. Chapter 4: Five Sisters

_CHAPTER FOUR:_

_FIVE SISTERS_

The hikers had left a map of the area which gave us a vast layout of the land. It wasn't good. There were woods, woods, and more woods. No place was safe, the dead had already begun to infest the forest as we knew, and hunting became harder and harder. The animals were nearly all gone and we were dangerously low on food, but no one wanted to get that conversation started. Our only option was to look for shelter in one of the surrounding towns. That's when I first heard Ryan's voice. I don't think he'd used it in about a month. He had to give it a couple of tries before the words came out smooth.

"My high-school's in the next town over, it's right at the edge of forest. There's a broken lock on a second story window, the chemistry lab. The cafeteria's full of cans and stuff."

"There's probably people there already." I said.

"Gotta try." Spencer replied, "Ain't nuttin' else to do."

And again, he was right. The forest wasn't an option anymore and our food supply would only last another day or two. Soon, we would barely have the energy to stay awake much less trek through the woods hunting for squirrels. I'll skip the journey. It wasn't easy and it wasn't pretty.

We got there two days after we started walking and had the last bit of rations about ten minutes before we saw the school. The possibility of food almost hurt- and I realized that the point I had made earlier was moot, even if there _were_ people here, we were going to take whatever was inside, anything else would mean our deaths. Spencer and Ryan reached the clearing first. Emily and I fell behind when she had to stop to use the bathroom. I stood guard while the others walked on, I would have told Spencer he should stay with his girlfriend but I would rather have him as far from her as possible. When she came out she thanked me for staying with her, "...You took off your bow tie?" She asked. I had almost forgotten I was wearing a tuxedo. The white shirt had turned yellow and I'd long since ripped off the cummerbund. I took the tie out of my pocket, "I was going to throw it away but thought it might be useful some day. Don't know why I thought that."

"You should keep it."

"Why?"

"No reason, I just like it." She said with a weak smile and walked ahead of me. I had never seen her smile before. It was nicest thing to happen in weeks.

The school sat quiet. We stayed by the treeline for a few minutes before Spencer passed out the weapons. "Ryan'll go in through the broken window and open the back door for us, Emily, you can be the look out in case any wal-" Spencer stopped himself when he saw her. A girl of no more than sixteen, behind her another girl a couple of years young. They were both in dirty white dresses, their eyes had sunk and they walked on slow frail legs. It took a minute of watching to see that they were not walkers but starving. The eldest girl bent down and picked up two pale yellow flowers from the ground. She put one behind her ear and the other in her sister's hair. They started to walk back, hand in hand but the youngest stopped- they stood for a moment and looked up a the sky. I looked at Spencer, at Emily, no one seemed quite sure of themselves anymore. The girls disappeared into the school.

I gave Ryan a boost- he climbed the rest of the way up himself, he was gone a minute before the door clicked open. "See anything?" I asked him. He shook his head. We went in slow and quiet. We had learned the silent walk technique in the woods. Dry twigs were death traps. We were almost to the cafeteria when we heard the shots.

All weapons went up- the gunfire came from the gymnasium Ryan told us. Five shots, four in quick succession and a space of about ten seconds until the last one. We had to move fast now, walkers would have heard the shots, we kept the doors unlocked behind us in case we had to run. And if there were walkers in the building- either way we had to know what happened. Ryan had to show Spencer the way and Emily was outside on watch. So I went to the gym alone, I was given five minutes before they would be out of there with or without me. I see it now like I saw it then.

Walking into that gym, that was when I knew. The hope I had for a military rescue, that spark in the middle of your heart that tells you things will be okay eventually- that things are bad now but a day would come when everything would be like it was before, that was the moment my light went out. Five sisters had come to this school for safety. They'd made it as long as they could, they'd eaten all the food but the world outside hadn't changed. They had no one to take care of them. No parents, no policemen. All they had was a gun with five shots left inside. The younger ones had lines up, that ten seconds before the last shot- that was the oldest looking at her family and turning the gun on herself. I've thought about that day every day since. I've thought about running from the clearing and telling that sixteen year old that things would be okay- that she could come with us. And I've had dreams when she did, and Spencer was excepting and Emily was like a mother to the littlest of them. In my dreams we were all alive, we all belonged to the each other and when one of us was sick or hungry the others would take care of them. And those girls would play the games that children play.

As I stood there and watched their blood spread out and pool together- I prayed for something to happen, anything that could change what I was feeling inside. I didn't care if it was a bomb going off or a military parade outside I just needed to feel something other than that hopelessness. That sadness I didn't know I had the capacity to feel. And then something did happen. The youngest of the girls stood up. The oldest sister had aimed for the heart. We thought only a bite could turn someone, but now I saw that that wasn't true. This wasn't an infection, this wasn't a disease. This was Hell, and it was coming for me in a white cotton dress and flowers in its hair.


	5. Chapter 5: Closer

_CHAPTER FIVE:_

_CLOSER_

"Walkers!" Emily yelled from the front of the school- by then I had reached the cafeteria, Spencer was flipping tables in a blind rage. No food left. Emily ran in- blind panic in her eyes.

"There's hundreds of them, the gunshots-"

"Who they hell fired those shots?" Spencer turned to me.

"The girls we saw-" I began- but at that moments the glass from the front door shattered and the locks began to break from the force of hundreds walkers pushing hungry against the doors.

"Out the back then." Spencer said and lead the way, I stayed.

"No, there's..." He looked back at me waiting for the rest but I didn't have time to finished my sentence. Two of the five girls appeared at the far end of the hall. The youngest baring her milk teeth at us, an innocent monster. The other crawled on her arms, the bullet must have shattered her spine.

"What, are you afraid of some little girls?" Spencer laughed and moved toward them.

A second is all it takes now, a moment of hesitation and everything can change. As Spencer rushed those girls without an ounce of remorse even though he, like us, had seen them alive only minutes before I began to feel like things were getting smaller. Like the hallways weren't big enough to fit through- like the ceiling was falling on our heads. The sound of the dead groaning from behind us kept my knees locked, air was suddenly gone from my lungs. Spencer yelled for us to follow him, Ryan ran like a bat out of hell- but I couldn't. I couldn't run, I couldn't even breathe. Emily asked me what was wrong but I couldn't answer. Spencer and Ryan disappeared into the hallway assuming we were right behind them. I heard the others girls snarl and bite at them and the sound of their heads being cracked like eggshells.

The front doors broke and hundreds of dead poured inside. Emily rushed me into the run down refrigerator in the kitchen behind the counter. All the food inside had turned to rot, it took all we had no to vomit. The smell must have kept them away because just outside, the room was filling up with walkers who never tried the door.

Emily and I were in complete darkness. The space was so small we had no choice but be pushed against each other. "I'm sorry." I whispered, "I froze..."

"It's okay." The wind of her breath brushed my cheek.

"Thank you for helping me. Spencer will be mad you didn't go with him. But I won't let him hurt you." She was quiet for a moment, then-

"He's not my boyfriend." Just then one of the dead things knocked something over outside- they rushed and swarmed whatever it was with ravenous expectation but there was nothing. I heard them give up and continue to wander.

"What do you mean he's not your boyfriend?"

"He was our neighbor. He used to watch me through the window... and then, when it started, he came to get me in my house. He saved my life. He said if I wanted to live through it I would have to do what he said. I would have to be his." Her breathing started to change, it became hard and shallow and struggling. She was crying. I took her hand in mine and leaned in close to her ear, "You don't belong to him..." her hand tightened around mine. Her cheek lay wet on my shoulder. "You don't belong to anyone."

The walkers sounded less and less prominent outside, we knew the oxygen wouldn't last forever but we deiced to a few minutes before trying to escape. She asked about my family. Her story was similar to mine, her brother had died a year before in a car accident and Spencer, she told me, was not far from her father. I told her about my sister, my writing, about living on my own in New York. I told her I was on the way to the wedding of a girl I had loved all my life and how I used to picture her in a wedding dress, looking at me through the veil.

She said she was home from college and that going away to a new place was the first time she realized she didn't have to be miserable all the time. That life got better than what she knew at home, at least it seemed like it would until it all changed. And she told me she actually _did _have a boyfriend in school, but he lived in Miami and she was pretty sure he didn't get out in time.

It felt like two hours later when we heard the shots but really it was not more then half and hour. Spencer had returned, and now he was armed. Ryan fired off some rounds down the street to distract the walkers while Spencer mowed down the ones who hadn't left yet. He opened the fridge, Emily dropped my hand, and though my eyes hadn't adjusted yet, I could have sworn I saw a flash of pain cross his face. The only emotion he'd ever shown aside from rage.

"Come on we don't have much time." He said extending a hand to her. He glanced at me for a moment and led us out to the back.

"Where's Ryan?" Emily asked.

"He'll be right along." Spencer said and pointed to a path in the woods. "Go on that way- he's gonna meet us. We found weapons and a place with some canned food left. Ryan knows this town real good. We're gonna be okay here. Go on." He told her again.

"What about you guys?"

"We still have to go back and get more guns. Hurry, Ryan's waiting" She hesitated and then started to run, pretty soon she was gone and it was just Spencer and I. "You found food?" I asked him, things were starting to get foggy again, I was lightheaded and weak. Standing in the fridge so long had been more draining than I realized.

"Food, yeah we found food, guns, everything we need..." He looked around the clearing, "...for the three of us."

I opened my mouth to ask- before I had a chance he slid the knife just under my ribcage. There was no pain at first. And then it was like someone had truck a match and lit my insides on fire. He lowered me to the ground as the blood began to soak through my designer tuxedo shirt. Spencer walked over to the door and opened it- he put a rock against it to keep it that way and fired a shot into the school. He walked back to me and looked down.

"That'll teach you to touch another man's things." He cleaned the blood off his blade, took my poorly constructed weapon and left. Blood oozed between my fingers, and as my breathing began to slow I could hear the approaching droll of the hungry dead.


	6. Chapter 6: The Mercy of Living

_CHAPTER SIX:_

_THE MERCY OF LIVING_

There was a moment, when Bambi and I were children, that I thought she was going to die. It was the birthday of one of the boys in her class. Bambi and I were invited by his mother, neither one of us had friends because of the way we dressed, white trash poor. She ate a piece of the strawberry cake, and as soon as she put it down, he throat had closed up. We never knew about our allergies because our father didn't know about them. I thought she was kidding at first, we used to make faces at each other when we felt uncomfortable in crowds. Her face got big and red and her eyes wild and confused. She rolled back off the chair, everyone looked- their smiles slowly fading. She should have died that day. The bite she took was too big and the reaction so severe that she would have been dead by the time the ambulance got the call. She told me later that after the initial panic, after the first few moments of not being able to breathe she closed her eyes and saw something. She never told me what it was, but it was then that she knew she wasn't going to die. And she didn't, because on this particular day, the birthday boy's older brother was home from school, med school.

They made me look away so I never did see what he did. All I knew was that her dress was covered in blood and she was breathing again. I knew she wasn't supposed to die yet, I could feel it like I had never felt anything before, and that night as I lay to go to sleep I realized that things only happen when they're supposed to. I am going to die, very soon I'm sure. But that day, laying on the blood-soaked grass, that wasn't my day. I knew it, and so did whoever sent that deer.

It had been weeks since we saw anything in the woods, squirrels were rare, but deers, they were gone. She stepped into the clearing and saw me on the ground. She trotted up to me like we were old pals who hadn't seen one another in ages. I raised a hand to pet her, she licked it. I brushed her fur, and as I did I had the stark realization that nothing is saved unless something is lost. The deer was a miracle, but miracles weren't free.

The dead stumbled absently from the door, most of them had left or were killed but Spencer had left enough alive to see me torn to shreds. About six all together. The deer saw them and tried to run- she tried to break free but I had my hands wrapped around her neck. She had nowhere to go. This time I knew the tears were there. But I'm not ashamed of what I did. I wish I didn't have to do it but you and I and anyone else left in this world knows I didn't have a choice. She fought against me- she too wanted to live, to run into the woods and never look back. The dead were just about on top of us, they saw me just as they did her- I reached down and grabbed her front leg. I pulled hard and it cracked. She crumbed on top of me, the walkers feasted.

I pulled my legs in so I was completely hidden beneath her. Blood rained from above, it covered my face like a warrior's mask. They chewed through her organs, her flesh- they ripped her bones away as one would the wrapping on a candy bar. I closed my eyes and saw what my sister saw when she ate the strawberry that closed her throat. I saw myself after this. I saw Emily laughing by a river, and she looked at me, not the way someone looks at a gravestone, but the way someone looks at their best friend, their partner.

By nightfall, most of the walkers had left. And the drop in temperate along with the blood which had now congealed and stuck to every part of me had begun to make me shiver and shake. The three walkers that stayed simply sat, as if their brains' drive to feed had, for the moment, been satisfied. I had to move or I would die here. Their static state presented me with the best opportunity I would ever have. But I was still wounded, and this wouldn't be easy. I reached around the deer's body and found what I was looking for- one of the bones the walker's had snapped off and left behind. It had a slight curve and sharp edge. Just what I needed.

In a way I guess you could say I did die there. Everything I was died that day, everything I was taught to be. As I pushed the carcass of the animal I had sacrificed to save myself off of me and stood up I could feel I was not myself anymore. I wasn't the kid who cried at the end of sad movies, I wasn't the scared writer who let a little boy run off into the woods. I didn't know who I was, but neither did the walkers at my feet.

I hit the first so hard his right eye exploded out of his face and landed in the brush. The other two stood simultaneously, the drive to feed had returned. I wasn't afraid. For the first time I wasn't afraid of anything at all. I jammed the bone beneath the first one's chin- it went so far up I lost it in his head. The other tried to grab me but I stepped to the side and got behind him, I placed my hand on the back of his head and pushed it into the brick wall of the school. Over and over I slammed his face until every bone was broken, until all that was left was the scalp I was still holding on to. I went back into the school, first thing was first, I had to stitch myself up and get myself warm. First stop was the nurse's station. I didn't see any wounds on those girls who were here save for the ones that took their lives. They probably never had a reason to take the first-aid kit.

Emily would later tell me that she spent that night crying beside Spencer. He told her to be quiet but she couldn't. He beat her as Ryan pretended to sleep. She told me the beating wasn't nearly as painful as the thought of me dying. I spent that night slipping a needle and thread through the ripped gash on my side. There was a window in the nurse's station, anytime the pain was too much I looked out hoping the see the moon. It finally came, and seeing it there as I had when things had been okay helped me to finish what I had to do. My hands shook, my heart beat hard and fast.

When it was all over I stumbled to the cabinet and poured rubbing alcohol on it. I moved to the little mirror over the broken sink and what I saw was unrecognizable to me. First I thought it was because of the blood on my face but as I looked on I saw that what I didn't recognize were the eyes that looked back at me. They were not my eyes.


	7. Chapter 7: Ain't no Grave

_CHAPTER SEVEN:_

_AIN'T NO GRAVE_

It took about a week for the wound to close completely. In that time I had secured all the doors, killed a few undead stragglers, and found a hidden stash of candy bars and potato chips in the desk of an over-weight teacher. I worked myself up from five to ten push ups a day. Unimpressive if not for the stitches- which came undone a few times in the process. I was getting myself strong again. I wanted to leave as soon as possible of course, knowing full well that every night Spencer crawled on top of Emily it was nothing less than sexual assault. I wanted to leave every minute of every day for that week and the next. But I didn't. I wouldn't do her any good unless I was good and ready to face him. The skeleton key that opened every locker in the school was beneath the principle's desk in the main office. It took a good while to go through them all but in the end, I had a pocket knife, about sixteen lighters and a hell of a lot of energy bars. God bless cheerleaders.

Two weeks and three days after I had been stabbed and left for dead, I was ready to kill the man who had killed me. All Ryan wanted was to come back to his hometown- it was obvious they would eventually have gone to his house, I was hoping against all hope they hadn't left yet. The town was quiet, it had walkers but no more than anywhere else, no real reason to leave- but, with all the stores in town Ryan knew could get to, they had lots of reasons to stay. The first morning I was at the school I went to the main office looking for Ryan's file, I circled his address on a map and spent every day since memorizing the way there.

I took four hours to move seven blocks, the walkers snapped their heads at anything moving faster than they did. I'd taken the maggot infested beef from the fridge and hung the pieces around my neck using string I found in the art department. Every now and then I would stop to vomit along the road until I had nothing left to throw up. The sound of it made them turn but the smell wasn't inviting enough to investigate. I also had to stop constantly in abandoned stores and public restrooms to strip myself of all my clothes- I had found nine jackets around the school and had used pieces from each to make one extremely warm bite proof suite of armor. I tested it by putting a pieced of wood in the sleeve and trying to bite through to it. It was as close to impossible as I was going to get.

The house must have been well taken care of in its day, but now the overgrown grass lay dying thick over the front yard. I knew my journey was not in vain, I could see the flicker of fire on the top side window. The moon was blocked by storm clouds- I was nothing more than a shadow climbing the veranda. The slow trickle of rain was also welcome as it helped to mask the sound of my boots on creaking wood. I peered through the window- Spencer lay beside Emily- his arm thrown across her body as if to say _mine_.

I lifted the window one inch at a time and slipped inside as quiet as the breeze that followed.

Emily opened her eyes; I got down on one knee beside the makeshift stove they had constructed. My face was lit by momentary flickers of orange firelight, she gave me a small scared smile. I opened the pocket knife so she would know my purpose. She gave the slightest nod and simply closed her eyes again. I moved around her to Spencer's side and put the blade on his throat:

Ryan stood still as a statue at the edge of the room- we looked at each other frozen in our mutual surprise,

"Spencer!" He yelled-

I slashed as best I could but Spencer turned with the motion of the cut suffering a mere nick- he immediately pushed me off him knocking over the stove in the process- its embers scattered around the room like a thousand red stars. In about two second it was I under Spencer's control. He grabbed my wrist and smashed it on the hardwood until knife came tumbling out. Emily screamed, pleading for my life-

"How the fuck did you-" he began but let the thought go when the rage of nearly being killed in his sleep took over. "Ryan get me that pistol there." Spencer said while wrapping both hands around my neck. Ryan rushed to the weapon's cache in the corner of the room- Emily threw herself on top of him, punching, biting, scratching- Ryan almost lost to her ferocity but in a moment of dumb luck he rushed the wall and Emily cracked the back of her head against a bookshelf and collapsed to the floor.

"HOO-EY!" Spencer yelled, "I do believe her skull may have just popped!"

The sounds of the room were fading, all I could hear was a dull pulse thumping slower and slower in my ears. Spencer leaned his weight on me as he lifted a hand from my neck to take the pistol from Ryan. He clicked the hammer back and put the cold barrel hard against my temple. Then, he took it away, "You know what? Better idea-" he aimed the gun back towards the unconscious Emily; the last mistake he ever made.

I couldn't reach any vital part of him which is why he wasn't too concerned with my hands. What he didn't know- what _I _had forgotten in the madness, was that I had put a small plastic lighter in every pocket of the monster jacket I'd created. I writhed this was and that so he couldn't aim, "Keep still piggy." he laughed trying to get a clear shot- I slipped a hand into my front breast pocket, sparked the lighter on and held it at his wrist- it was only seconds before he jumped back with a start. I snatched the knife from the floor and slashed wildly at his throat.

Blood, everywhere there was blood. Spencer fell against a wall- he slapped both hands on his throat trying to stop it from coming out so fast. Ryan started to back out of the room which was now glowing orange bright as the curtain caught fire. I took the fallen gun and raised it up to his chest.

"Don't. Move." I said, his pants grew dark and wet with urine.

Turning my attention back to Spencer, I pulled his hands away from the wound. Red spilled out by the gallons. I walked to Emily- the back of her head was cut but the bone was intact.

"Wake up, the room's on fire." I smiled. Her eyes blossomed open, after a moment of confusion, she stood with me. Spencer's breath grew shallow and soon stopped. Once it did she said,

"Thank you."

"No problem." I replied. Ryan stood like a frightened center piece in the middle of the room.

"Please..." he pleaded, "I was afraid of him... I only did what I had to."

I turned to Emily, "I was going to leave what to do with him up to yo-" I didn't have a chance to finish my sentence before she grabbed a hidden combat knife from beneath the mound of weapons on the floor and punched it through his chest plate. Ryan collapsed.

The fire grew into a blaze around us, "They'll turn soon." she said.

We watched the house burn from the backyard. "Where did you guys find all these guns anyway?" I asked. "Ryan's dad had the pistol, police station had a couple Berettas and the shotgun. Army barracks had the knife."

"Your knife." I said.

"Yeah," Emily said with a smile, "...my knife." she took my hand in hers, and as we walked away from the heat of those flames, we could hear two trapped walkers burning in the second story window.


	8. Chapter 8: Team work

_CHAPTER EIGHT:_

_TEAM WORK_

"Rock paper scissors?" I asked as we knelt behind a mound of Fall-orange leaves.

"No way, it's my turn." Emily said and jumped up. I turned to Oliver who still had the _are they for real _expressionfrozen on his face and said "She's something else isn't she?"

"You guys actually have fun doing this?" He asked, not taking his eyes off Emily or the walker she rushed.

"We're just as surprised as you are." I told him and watched as Emily slipped the walker's advance and rammed the spear through his head.

"How long have you been together?" he asked, Emily waved, we waved back.

"We're not. Why do you think she likes me?"

"I meant together as in, you know just together."

"Oh. A few months." I said, a little embarrassed.

"Yeah, she likes you." He smiled.

It had been ninety seven days since we left Spencer and Ryan to their fate. We found Oliver fighting for his life in the woods two days before, a group of five walkers managed to surround him.

"Five walkers?" Emily had said as we watched the chubby man try to outrun the mini horde, "How'd he survive this long?"

"Let's ask him." I said and with that we both took off, we had learned that guns were a last resort. In the three months we had been living in the woods, we had made all sorts of weapons from materials in our environment. Emily liked long spears and things she could throw, getting too close meant getting the stench of death on your clothes, and the smell of it was the only thing neither of us were quite used to yet.

I liked smaller, more intimate weapons- maybe it was because I used a pen to kill my first walker, or the deer bone that saved my life, or the pocket knife I used to slay Spencer. There was something about being that close and making sure- something about the vibration of a knife crunching a skull... of course I wouldn't tell Oliver any of this, he was an engineer, a homebody- not the kind to survive an apocalypse by being violent, and yet here he was. To be honest, my thrill of killing walkers did give give me pause. It wasn't even a year ago that I couldn't muster the courage to walk to a girl in a bar. But now most of those girls were dead and I was left to make sure they weren't walking too.

Emily and I had stuck by the river, following it north towards Massachusetts. My grandparents owned a farm in Amherst. Grandaddy owned a few guns but that wasn't the prize, he grew up in the time nuclear threat, he was a young man during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and told me on more than one occasion that he would never feel that fear again. Against my grandma's wishes he installed a fallout bunker in their basement where he kept enough canned food and water to last six months, maybe a year. That was the prize.

I had told him to survive nuclear fallout, a year's worth of food and water probably wasn't enough- to which he responded: "Well, it's better than nothing." and you just can't argue with that, and I'm glad I didn't try. I told Emily this on the first days we were alone and she agreed it was out best bet, no one outside my family knew about the shelter and even if they did, they couldn't get into it without the key, the location of which was also only known to family members. I didn't want to get my hopes up but it wasn't exactly out of the question to think my grandparents were there now, sitting and enjoying their bunker without worry of walkers or starvation.

So we set out first moving east, it was hard to get your bearings right away but eventually we hit the Housatonic State Forest in Connecticut and from there we put the sunrise to our right and sunset to our left and trekked more or less straight north. Every day we would hunt and one of us would rest while the other found the nearest source of water. Keeping just one of us strong at all times was the only way to keep the team strong all the time. And we trained rigorously. By the time we crossed the state border we were proficient killers and it started getting fun. There was a routine to the way we moved, the way we stalked our prey be it walkers or animals. For a while we weren't just surviving, I dare say we were almost living again.

When we picked up Oliver we were only about a week from Amherst. Since we did most of the killing and hunting during the day, he always volunteered go ahead of us whenever we found a cabin, shack or abandoned farmhouse along the way to sleep in. If we did find a safe place, he would sing us the folk songs he used to play at open mics. He said he had lost his guitar along the way so we would have to forgive the roughness of it but the truth is he was a great singer. He would teach me and Emily lyrics, though I never sang. I much preferred to watch and listen to Em as she closed her eyes to hit the high notes. He even gave her a notepad and pen and told her if she could write the lyrics, he would make up a melody.

"I'm not the writer of the group." She told him pulling her head my way.

"Have you tried?" He asked her.

"I used to write poetry, when I was little."

"Poetry's just music without the rhythm." He said and gave her a smile. She asked him about his life before, about the music, the open mics, about who his own songs were about. He looked up to the stars and with a soft sad smile he only shook his head.

The next few nights I would pretend to be asleep when she got up in the middle of the night and tried her hand at writing. Some nights the pen would scratch that pad so fiercely I thought she would rip it to pieces. On others, she just sat tapping and tapping until finally giving up and going to sleep, only to wake up a few minutes later and trying again.

I studied the map Oliver had provided us with and made my best guess at where we were, I was beginning to be good at that. By my calculations we were no more than a day or two from the farm, but we had run out of food and the animals had run from the forest. There is nothing scarier than getting a twinge of hunger and knowing there's not hing to eat. We all sat down to discuss a course of action and before long it seemed obvious we only had one choice. Go to the nearest town and try our luck there before moving on to the farm. But the towns were teeming with hungry dead. In the end we decided to try it, we didn't have a choice and at this point and the walkers were becoming less and less of a problem as we learned to defend ourselves better. We taught Oliver everything we knew about killing them but still he hesitated each time. We were always there to back him up, but I told him someday we wouldn't be and his hesitation would cost him dearly. He agreed. He said he would try his best.

I circled the nearest town on the map- the next day Oliver would scout ahead and report back what he saw. We told him we could go but he insisted, saying if he couldn't do this much than he was just holding us back. We relented and got ready to go to sleep but Emily stood awkward in the center of the room.

"Em?" I crooked my head at her, she swallowed hard. I looked around- no walkers, no danger.

"I was wondering..." She started and and took a piece of paper from her pocket. "Can I...?"

Oliver came back and sat down next to me, "Go on." He encouraged her. She looked at me, her hands shaking, "Please." I said.

She cleared her throat and put the paper up to her face, "...Not gonna sing it." She said, and began to read:

_The worlds fell away and night came once, and forever to stay. For a time, starlight shuddered at the truth of it, and I, in the middle, was lost. _

_A happy child with missing teeth, _

_a pig tailed girl in dry dirty leaves._

_And mother who was kind, left on a Saturday and simply died. And father who loved me, sat at home and forgot. _

_My brother, my watcher, my care taker, never saw the thing that killed him._

_And the girl was taken off, never to be seen again. _

_The worlds fell away, but night was ending and light gave way. _

She folded the paper and put it back in her pocket. Her hands were clammy and white, she had never been so scared. Oliver got up and gave her a big bear hug. He said he was so proud, not only that she wrote something so well but that it was personal and hard to read but she did it anyway. I almost didn't say anything, I didn't know how to express what I was feeling. I wrapped my arms around her and slow held them there. "You are so much more than you see." I whispered in her ear, and then I kissed her. She leaned softly into me and took my hand. We laid down together, our stomachs empty, our hearts a little fuller than before. We went to sleep. Outside, the wind blew riled and uncertain.


	9. Chapter 9: Spencer Town

_CHAPTER NINE:_

_SPENCER TOWN_

"What do you see?" Emily whispered. There wasn't much- the road had been blocked by thousand of pieces of furniture. We could hear the fire and just barely see the top of the flames. The desks and chairs that hadn't been used for the wall were now burning in the center of the street. The men on the other side had found every bar in town and stripped them of their contents. I could see flashes of leather jackets and big, bearded men holding bloody machetes. Their bikes shook the ground, the sound exploded out half a mile in every direction. But they weren't afraid of walkers coming, not because they couldn't get through, but because there were almost no walkers to speak of. Emily and I had seen bits and pieces- fingers, feet, intestines- all of which had been scattered all across the forest and roads leading to town. A clever way to mask any smell from town but it must have taken a long time and a lot of indifference. Oliver hadn't returned from his recon of this place, we waited hours but finally had to set out and look for him. We feared the worst but as we got closer, any hope of seeing him alive or seeing him at all began to fade.

"We should just go to your grandparents farm, these people aren't going to help us, if he's here... there's nothing we can do, not in the state we're in right now. Plus, Oliver might already be there, maybe he got lost and just went ahead, he knew that's where we were going anyway."

Emily was scared, I was too. This was like a town full of Spencers. We could hear their hooting and hollering from deep in the woods. And other things too. Dogs were being beaten, women were screaming bloody murder from places we couldn't see, to people who couldn't help them. My eyes went in and out of focus, for a moment I felt like I was on a rickety ship in dangerous waters. I was too dizzy to stand.

"The farm's a day's walk. If we go now we'll lose our strength in the woods, we won't make it." I told her. Sugar coating it wouldn't do anyone any good. I took her hands- they were ice cold. We were the closer to death now than we had ever been, we needed to eat, and since we left the riverside water was becoming more and more scarce. Our last drink had been about twenty six hours ago, we couldn't risk moving out of here without a drink and something to eat. I wasn't looking for a feast, but I wasn't going to let Emily waste away when we were this close. As I was trying to figure a way inside I heard a whimper, sharp and high, too high for a human. The dog limped slow and quiet toward us from the street. His bones plainly visible beneath shedding fur.

"Mother-fuckers!" Emily almost yelled. I shushed her- this wasn't the time. If we could figure out how to get in and out with food and water we could bring the dog with us and all the abuse he's suffered would be a thing of the past, but first- we had to be vigilant, and that included being quiet as can be. The dog walked closer to the wall whimpering louder and louder.

"Shh..." Emily pleaded through the broken furniture, "...be still now Menace."

"Menace?"

"Yes, that's his name now."  
"I guess asking not to get too attached is out of the question."

"Why wouldn't I be attached to my own dog?"

The bikers who took over this town were smart enough to know walkers couldn't climb trees but too hubris to think no one else would dare. Under any other circumstances they'd be right, but desperate is desperate. When I finally got up there it took all my focus to not fall off. Now I could see it all, The fire, the drunk men throwing rocks at teenage girls tied to telephone poles, the end of humanity as I knew it. I searched for any sign of Oliver but found nothing, I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. In my mind I had already begun to plan my return. I wanted to set his place on fire like I did Ryan's house. I wasn't sure if that would ever happen, I wasn't sure what would be the fate of those tied up girls, but I had to tell myself something to get me through this part.

I landed on soft grass, Menace wobbled over to me like he knew I wasn't like the rest of them. Most abused dogs fear people so much they twitch when you move toward them. This pup was so desperate to be cared for that fear was no longer a part of him. Emily climbed the tree after me, I told her to wait there and watch in case any of them were came close, we came up with a whistle that sounded enough like the wind blowing through trees that we were pretty sure they wouldn't be able to tell is was a warning system.

"Here-" She said and dropped her knife down, it landed blade-in-dirt a few feet away. "...take care of Black Betty, no scratches."

"You named your knife too?"

"The knife named it self."

I ripped it from the ground and stuck it in my pocket, I gave Menace a nice pet behind the ears and moved out, he followed close as I went ahead sticking to the shadows. I found a playground to my right, I hid behind the swings to see what I could see of the layout ahead. I had to figure out where they were keeping their food. Then, I heard running water behind me- followed by a zipper.

I froze. It was too dark to see anything- and I was hoping that was also the case with whoever was behind me. I could hear him eating something, something crunchy- as he stepped out I saw it was an apple, but I guess he was full because he threw it to the ground ahead, Menace jumped at the opportunity, bee-lining it straight to the apple. The man bent down, broke the apple apart and fed it to him.

"Here you go fella." he said petting the dog, then, his eyes moved past Menace to my boots- my legs, to me.

His eyes and mouth shot open-

"Hey!" He screamed from the top of his lungs- I jumped on top of him and put my hands over his mouth.

"Shh- please I just want some food-"

But he took the silver .44 Magnum from his belt and tried to aim at my head. The rock throwing drunks turned around, they shushed each other and listened. I tried to pull the gun away from him but he wasn't giving it up- then: he fired. The sound was as deafening as an explosion, he tried again with all his might to push the gun up towards me- I was getting dizzy, I couldn't fight him. I reached in my pocket took the knife out but he saw it and in an instant knocked it out of my hands. His pals had all taken cover behind various things in the street. The burly man knocked me off of him and stood as fast as he could- "Here! I got him!" He said and his friends all climbed from the hiding spots. "You came into the wron-" Suddenly he was gasping- drowning in his own blood. Emily stood behind him as he fell away, she had slit his throat so quietly it took me a moment to realize what had happened. She slipped Black Betty into her belt and helped me up.

"Run." She said- just moments after we left the playground the man's friends got there and saw what had happened. Bullets exploded around us- Emily jumped to the low tree branch and lowered her hand to me.

"I can't" I wheezed- my vision beginning to darken.

"GRAB MY HAND!" She shouted over the bullets and somehow I did. We fell to the other side of the wall and ran into the woods. "We'll be back for you Menace!" Emily yelled and she wrapped her arms around me for support.

"Come back here you thieving bitch!" The men hollered behind us. As ran through the black, the ground beneath me became like liquid ink, I had no energy left. "Come on, keep running, we can't stop, they're still behind us." she said in gasps- and they were, I could hear them moving the furniture aside, they had some sort of door mechanism we hadn't seen. I heard the dog barking- the men hollering, gunshot smashing the trees next to us. "Come on, you can do it baby." But I couldn't. There was nothing left to keep me going, the jump to the tree was my last ounce of strength. She tried to carry me along, but I collapsed right there in the cold dark woods with those men hot on our heels.


	10. Chapter 10: Kin

_CHAPTER TEN:_

_KIN_

"Pleeease!" the voice shouted in desperation from somewhere in the distance... I fought my eyelids open but everything was still just a bright white blur.

"They'll kill me!" he pleaded. A young man by the sounds of it. Then, someone replied; a woman.

"You're dead anyway." she stated in a matter of fact sort of way. Things were coming more into focus. I could just make out the water-stained floral wallpaper curling from neglect, the paint chipped radiator in the corner, the angled ceiling above. I was in an attic.

"NO!" the young man begged and cried outside. I stood up, stronger than I was anticipating, and moved to the window. I licked my lips, they were still cracked but healing now, almost moist. A set of generator-powered lights shone silver on the grass two stories below. The young man had fallen on both knees in defeat. He sat one hand palm-up toward the sky in surrender, the other held tight against the side of his neck.

The woman continued- "I'm sorry but you have to go now. We can't have you here." I could see the barrel of the rifle she was holding peeking from the edge of the semi-circle pool of light.

"Just kill me then." He coughed between sobs. "I got no place to g-" the woman fired. The young man's head popped red-white all across the grass. The woman moved into the light, her figured obscured by heavy clothing not unlike my own, she bent down to the dead young man and searched him. She slipped something of his into her pocket and waved to someone I couldn't see. Emily and Oliver came in from the dark and dragged the body somewhere away from the light. I knew where they were taking him because I knew where I was now. My grandparent's farm house. The went in the direction of the barn and were gone for a few moments, the woman who had killed the young man stood alone in the light. She looked up to me from the lawn; it was Bambi, my sister.

"It happened all at once..." She told us as we sat around the dining room table later that night, "...before I had time to react to the news of the outbreak or whatever it was, the TV's lost signal and the panic started. I found a way onto a boat. My work had me traveling by ferry from Sweden to Poland and back again almost weekly. It was a a massive ship, designed for long distance travel but they only used it to take people across the Baltic. I became friends with the Captain, James. He's the one who let me on. The ride began fairly calm, but someone on the ship had been injured and a died a day later. Terrible things happened on that ship. When we finally docked at Boston Harbor, we found the whole place in ruins. A group of those things came at us but there were men there waiting for them. They killed all the walkers and took me and James to their hideout. We thought they were friendly but we were wrong. They didn't keep James for long. The first time they tried to rape me, he fought for me- they killed him and threw his body to the dead. It was a week or so before I found my chance. I killed the man in charge, I cut his throat and ran. I took an abandoned car and rode route two all the way here." I asked if she knew what happened to our grandparents. She did:

"When I came they were down there in the bunker. I looked for the key in the hiding place, they had left a note about how to knock on the door so they knew it was me or you. They were fine. Grandma couldn't stay down there long, she was too claustrophobic and since there was no fallout we didn't have to. Grandpa and I built a barbwire fence, we made all kinds of things to keep the farm safe. They must have known we were protecting something. They came in the middle of the night..." I thought she was going to cry, I moved my hand to mover hers as a sign of support. She stood and moved to the window. I asked Emily and Oliver for a moment alone with my sister.

Bambi told me when we were alone that she had to fight them off that night, she ran to the barn where their weapons were hidden and took enough of them out that they retreated. By the time she got back to the house, our grandparents had been shot, they were turning. She did what she had to do.

Em had been right all along, Oliver _did_ get lost in the woods and had to do the best he could to navigate his way to the farm. Bambi almost killed him when he got to it. He told her he was with me and that we were looking for my family. Knowing the men who were in that town and what they would do if Emily and I went there- she gave Oliver some water and a small dinner and they both set out to find us: when they finally did, Emily was trying desperately to drag me from the gunfire. Oliver helped her while Bambi fired back against the men in the woods.

"They retreated but only for now," she told me, "...they'll be coming back soon."

"Can we hide out in the bunker?" I asked.

"It's a death trap down there, they would find the air vents and clog them up. Shoot us as soon as we opened the door."

"what do we do?"

"Not sure yet."

"Why'd you put that guy in the barn?" I asked, it had been bothering me since it happened, I was hoping for a different answer.

"We can cut him up, spread the pieces around the perimeter. Keeps the dead away." She said and swallowed a spoonful of tomato soup.

"Maybe we should leave. Take as much food and water as possible an-"

"Are you and Emily together?" She asked, cutting me off.

"I'm not sure. I think so."

"Good. It's important to have someone. Now more than ever. If you love her, you have to really love her. No casual crap."

"I do."

"Good." She said and stood up, she gave me the rest of her canned tomato soup and started to walk out- she stopped at the threshold and turned back, " I don't have anyone. Just you and this house."

Sometimes the bikers would send people who had been bitten, like the young man she had killed earlier that night. She suspected they were preying on her humanity. Trying to make her weaker by forcing her to kill innocent people or watching them die and come back as monsters. What they hadn't realized is that it made her even more callous and able to kill. It made her cold.

The Bambi I knew had died somewhere along the Atlantic, just as her brother did outside that school all those months ago. I was happy to see her, that same thin smile- that undying urge to be in control. But I wasn't happy to see what she had become. The Bambi who had left the country crying, afraid she would never to see her brother again, that Bambi would have brought the boy inside. She would have fed and cared for him until there was nothing else to be done. The thing behind her eyes that told you this girl was special, she was kind and warm and caring- that had been stripped away from her, and what was left, was nothing.

The world had made us confront our worst potentials. Those of us who knew each other before things changed had to see who we had turned into. We had to endure the loss of a loved one just as much as anyone who'd seen their families killed. I hadn't told Emily this while we were alone in the woods, but when I went to sleep every night, I thanked God that Bambi wasn't here to see who I was turning into. And what's more- I was grateful that she had most likely died in those first few days along with most people. But now I knew she had survived. And since then, she had seen friends killed, been abused by strangers, watched her grandparents murdered and turn to monsters.

That night in bed Emily whispered to me about how happy she was that Bambi was alive. She smiled big and pretty, a smile on my behalf. "I love you." I told her with a kiss. She replied in kind. I held her close until she fell asleep, I didn't want her to know what I was really feeling. I kept the tears in as long as I could, and mourned my sister.


	11. Chapter 11: Menace

_CHAPTER ELEVEN:_

_MENACE_

It must have been November because the wind had a near winter bite and the leaves lay dead in carpets on the hardening ground. I sat uncomfortable on watch in the bird's nest thirty feet from the earth. In the short time they had together, Bambi and our grandfather had built a small wooden platform on top of the highest tree at the edge of the farm. It must have been hard work but it was worth it. I could see nearly six hundred feet into the woods, anyone trying to come into the farm would have a hard time doing it in secret, and I would have ample time to warn the others. And yet, as I sat there that night looking over the forest, letting my mind wander back to Emily (as one in love usually does) I saw something move in the brush beneath me. But I would have heard a walker, and I would have seen the bikers. I watched close as the little branches gave way and the dog, Menace, walked through.

Don't misunderstand, I was happy to see him, Emily would be ecstatic, but this could only be bad. Either he left the closed town on his own, which would mean an unimaginable horde had over-run it, or they wanted us to think he did and let him out to lure us in. Either way, it was bad news. He whimpered up to me, I made sure no one was coming and left the nest bringing him in the house with me. Emily damn near burst when he scuttled over to her- his nails clicking and clacking on the hardwood.

"Where did you find him!?" She squealed and knelt down nuzzling his face. I grabbed a half eaten can of chicken soup and poured it on a plate for him. It was gone before I could answer, "He wandered in from the forest." I told her, I couldn't help but smile at her unabashed show of love for the creature. Oliver folded the lyrics he had been teaching Em and put them back in his pocket. She liked music but he had no chance against the dog.

"Match made in heaven." He said through a grin.

"I bet he knows all sorts of tricks." Emily guessed.

"Is he theirs?" Bambi asked as she came down the stairs.

"We saw him when we snuck into town." I told her.

"How did he get out?"

"I don't know."

"We have to check it." She said and darted off to get her clothes and weapons from the closet.

"We can't- it could be a trap."

She ripped the closet apart and suited up as if getting ready for a war, "What if it's a horde? You want to sit here and pet the dog while we're overrun by walkers?"

"No..." I started- knowing there was only one solution to this problem, "...we should leave."

The room went quiet. Bambi snatched the shotgun from the closet and pumped it.

"Leave the only home we have? Because a dog wandered in?"

"He didn't escape, he couldn't have. It's either a trap or a horde and either way the safest thing to do now is just take as much food and water as we can and go." I said.

Emily stood and put a hand on my arm. "I agree. I don't think we're safe here." she said.

"And you?" Bambi asked Oliver. His eyes drifting away from her gaze-

"We're too close to that town, too many things could happen if we stay."

"Fine." She said as she took up the rifle and slung it over the shoulder- she headed for the door without another word.

Outside; I ran after her, we stopped dead center of the floodlights: "Why can't you trust me? Everything has to be your way! This is going to end bad, let's just leave, please!"

She stopped but kept her back to me, "If we don't make a stand, against the hordes or those who want to take what's ours then we're weak, they'll drive us off again and again and we'll never had a home. We can't leave, we have to fight."

"What about back when we were kids? We didn't make a stand against dad. We did what we had to to get out of there."

"I got out of there..." She turned to look at me, "I left you." She said, a deep regret filled her eyes and I knew then that she had never forgiven herself for leaving. I walked to her, close enough to see that her eyes were watering, "Anything else would only have made things worse..." I started, "...you and I both knew that then, and we know it now. Please Bambi, they're coming, I don't know if they're walkers or people but they are on their way. If it was just you and me I would fight. I don't want to leave here either. But, I love Emily like I've never loved anything. If she got hurt or... I'm not strong like you, losing her would kill me."

She looked past me to the house. I Now know what she saw, though at the time I hadn't realized. She saw the only place we ever felt happy in the years we were children. Our mother was miserable with our dad, things were always bad but they only got worse when she left. We were beaten, neglected, intimidated. But every few months when our school started calling about our clothes or lateness he would bring us here and find a new run down apartment for us to move to in another district. Our grandparents would buy us new clothes, give us healthy food like apples from their orchard, they would take us to the movies and ice cream parlors. When we were clean and strong again our father would return knowing the new school wouldn't ask any questions for a while- it was as if a reset button had been pressed for him. But for us, being here was a break from the nightmare of our lives. He told us whoever told on him would have to watch the other get the beating of their life. So our grandparents never knew what we endured. All they did know was that our father was poor and was too proud to take their money. An escape, that's what Bambi saw when she looked past me that night. But it wasn't that anymore. It was the plastic shelter on the path of a tornado. It was a tomb waiting to be filled. And she refused to see it:

"I can't. I can't leave here. I don't have anything else. I'm glad you're happy little brother, take her, take Oliver, take the dog. Go... " she turned away from me, "But I just can't." and with that she walked off into the darkness ahead. I was left to make the decision, leave while we still could, or stay with my sister and fight whatever was coming.

My nightmares are not filled with the undead anymore. They are not about me becoming a wandering corpse. They're not about bandits, they're not about starving to death. My nightmares are me, standing outside, not wanting to leave my sister, not wanting to follow her.

"Wait..." I said to the black beyond the lights, "I'm coming."


	12. Chapter 12: Belly of The Beast

_CHAPTER TWELVE_

_BELLY OF THE BEAST_

I tried to give Emily my jacket, she pushed me off- "No!" she protested, "...you're the one going out there, you need it more than me..." she turned her back to me and faced the window. We were in the upstairs bedroom over looking the front of the house. On the lawn below, Bambi stood in the flood lights, eyes out to the black- waiting.

"Why do you have to go?" Emily's voice broke but she was strong for us, she didn't cry yet.

"I can't let her go alone, you know I can't."

"You were right, we need to leave- let's just go. She's not right... I'm sorry I didn't want to say anything, I thought she would be okay now that you're here but she's not. Something not right with her." Emily's eyes focused on the lonesome Bambi below, "...But... she's been through so much... I don't know. I know know what to do..."

I crossed to her, she didn't want to look at me, I could hear the sniffle in her breath. She took my hand;

"I'm scared you won't come back." She said and leaned her head on my chest.

"I will."

"Are you sure you don't want Oliver and I to come with you?"

"We can't leave the house unguarded, and we can't leave either one of you here alone." I said turning her around to face me.

She wiped her tears; "Want to take Menace with you?"

"I wouldn't want to bring him back there. Plus, he needs to stay here to protect you."

She smiled, I could tell she was trying to hold back the fear in her eyes for my sake, but I could see through it, and I think she could see through mine too. I kissed her, we stood there quiet with each other for a moment, and when the moment had passed, I left.

As I walked out, I put a hand on Oliver's shoulder: "Please take care, barricade all the openings and keep the high ground unless you're over run, if you are go to the bunker."

"I won't let her get hurt." He said smiling. I gave him a thank you nod and joined my sister outside. She gave me a pistol and the twelve gauge, she had my grandpa's double barrel which she'd sawed in half and a six shooter revolver. We moved quietly from the warmth of the house into the cold autumn night.

The door mechanism to Spencer Town sat leaning open. It must taken three or four of the men to move it- or a whole lot of walkers. The asphalt beneath had been scarred, carved under the weight of the hundred pieces of furniture cluttered above. We had seen some of the dead in the woods but not enough to be concerned. The bonfire in the center of the street had been trampled. It was no more than glowing red cinders. We saw no bikers, heard no screams. As we moved in closer I could see that the teenage girls who I had noticed tied up on my first trip here were still strapped- but their insides had been hollowed out, and their bones ripped and broken.

"It was walkers. This place is dead." I whispered. All three dead girls looked up- their jaws open, their eyes milky white and distant. Bambi moved forward further and further down the road.

"We have to be sure the bikers are dead too." She said.

"We have to go back, if the horde moves to the house Em and Oliver'll need back up."

"We didn't see a horde in the woods, if they were going there that's the only way they could go."

"I came with you to look around and we did now it's time to go."

"Something's not right." She said, suddenly there was a clatter of noise behind us; it was a metal can, red with yellow decals on the side and a burning fuse sticking out. A gaunt man with a mad look had thrown it- he stood outside the furniture wall on behind the door laughing. Three other men appeared behind him and pushed against the door;

"You're dead now bitch! We're taking all your food and burning your house to the ground!" One of the men yelled- and the door was closed, impossible to open with only the two of us. The can exploded in a spectacle of fire and sound; sparks shot roaring out in every direction, smashing against fragile windows and fading off into the air. For a moment there was silence. Then...

The dead dragged their feet through open store doorways, piling out from behind abandoned buildings, filling the streets by the hundreds. Blood dried brown shirts, soulless shoes- teeth. In seconds they were almost on us, Bambi and I fired at the closest ones to us. For a moment, everything was fire an smoke- behind it; bones, brains and blood. Our guns clicked empty- we had more rounds but no time to reload. I snapped my head back to see if the tree branch Emily and I had used to escape was still there but they had cut it and the wall was too high- we were trapped.

"Here!" a small voice shouted to us from somewhere above. She was a tiny thing, not an ounce of fat, "Run!" she continued, "...you wanna die?" She signaled for us to move to the alley beneath the brick building she stood on. Some walkers had started to bleed onto out path- Bambi ran ahead pushing and tackling them this was and that, I ran behind her swinging my shotgun against approaching heads as hard as I could, the girl from the roof lowered a makeshift rope she'd made from sheets and towels. Bambi didn't hesitate, she jumped up grabbing the rope and climbed up, the girl had tied it to something sturdy on the roof, I came up behind my sister and rolled onto the roof.

"You were almost walker pie!" The girl yelled leaning over me. I jumped up to my feet-

"They're going to the house!" I shouted at Bambi who was searching the town below for a way out.

"You're welcome." She girl folding her arms.

"We appreciate it, really, but those guys are going to our place right now and we have two of our group there, do you know a way out?" I asked, all I could think of was Oliver and Emily alone against the mad men who let walkers into their own town just to trap us in retaliation. Bambi started to reload her weapons, I did the same.

"There's a place where the wall is lower, but it's still too high to climb alone, if you can get a boost you ca-"

"Where?" Bambi interrupted. The girl pointed, we followed her finger to the small dip in the wall where there seemed to have been a small collapse of furniture.

"There's a hundred walkers between us and that wall." I said. Bambi grabbed the girl by the shirt and again didn't hesitate before pushing her off the edge-

"No!" I reached out- but the girl was gone. The walkers swarmed and feasted, her agonizing screams drew more in and our path was cleared.

"Come on!" Bambi screamed but my stomach felt as if it had been squeezed by giant hands, my legs went weak, my knees gave out. She Lifted me up and pulled me across-

"Emily's not gonna make it unless you get up and run right now." She said and pulled me to the side of the building, another rooftop lay ten feet below, Bambi threw her guns across- she took a running start and jumped. She rolled her landing and signaled for me to follow.

Time slowed, more and more walkers snaked across the the alley below me toward the dead girl. My sister's hand reached out to me from beneath. I didn't want it. I didn't want to follow her. But I knew somewhere in the woods those men were heading to my grandparents house, and when they got there they would kill the only thing I had left in the world. So I jumped. Bambi led the way and I followed. We ran through the woods- behind us the screams had died out, the walkers were fed- and ahead; the cracking sound of gunfire snapped and rolled like thunder only a mile out beyond the trees.


	13. Chapter 13: Red

_CHAPTER THIRTEEN:_

_RED_

Four of them, that was all that remained. Six came to take the house, one lay dead near the porch, another further back by the tree line. Emily must have seen him coming, she didn't skip a beat, got him between the eyes. The others spread out and took cover around the farm. Now they were firing back to the second story window. Bambi and hid behind the bird's nest tree.

"I'll climb the nest and take as many as I can out from here," she started, "...you flank around the left, when I start firing they'll either turn around to shoot me or run, don't let them do either. I'll start shooting in fifteen seconds, Go."

I ran. One of the men was at the front door- he kicked and kicked, the wood was starting to splinter, whatever was blocking it began to give way. I ran as fast as I could. Finally I reached the back of the barn and waited for Bambi's gunshots.

"Hurry up I'm here already." I muttered to myself as I lined the sights on my pistol with the head of the gaunt mad man we had seen earlier. The man at the front door gave it one last good kick and the dresser behind it tumbled backwards. I shifted my aim toward him- suddenly a walker grabbed me from behind, I heard the distant whip of Bambi's revolver in the distance. The walker's teeth wrapped around my forearm- I felt the pressure like a vice closing on my wrist, but he couldn't get through the my six layers of leather and fabric- I put the gun to his head and fired. The men on the other side of the barn would have heard it clear as day- as would the walkers I could now see coming in from the woods. I had about half a minute before they reached me, anything behind the trees was too dark to see anyway, my only choice was to focus on the men in front of the house. I peeked around the barn- Bambi had shot the one trying to get inside, the skinny one was gone, though I didn't know where. The remaining two fired back at my sister from the other side of the house.

I moved alongside the barn as careful as I could, distinctly aware of the walkers closing in from behind, distinctly aware of the man who knew I was waiting for me close by.

"Behind you!" I heard Emily call out from the window, I turned- the man had run out of ammo, he was swinging wildly at me with a small hatchet, the first blow hit my cheek bone sending me falling face first on the grass. My flew from my hands, gone. For a moment I lost my place, I lost time and understanding, and then I felt the pain and it sent everything rushing back. Half my face was covered liquid red. The man came at me again, he held the hatched with both hands and brought it down like a pendulum- I grabbed his wrists, the hatchet stopped sharp in front of me. Still concerned for Emily- I tilted my head back, the world went upside down and I saw one of the two men running into the house:

"No! Emily he's coming!" I screaming but I didn't hear her answer, all I heard was the mad laugh of the gaunt man as he laid all his weight on his hands and the hatchet came slowly down toward me- the blade cut a long vertical gash across the side of my face and suddenly he was screaming as the dead had begun to chew his legs. I pulled myself from beneath him and yanked the hatched from his hands: "Kill me!" he begged, I left him screaming.

As I ran to the house- the biker outside rose from his cover and pointed the gun at my chest: Bambi had left the nest and made her way closer, before the man squeezed his trigger she squeezed hers, he fell over like a board. I bolted desperate for the front door, Bambi fired at the walkers that had begun to bleeding into the farm.

"Emily!" I screamed as I ran inside, but before I could reach the stairs the last biker's body dropped down from above landing directly in front of me. Emily was on the floor of the hallway above looking down from the broken banister. The man had her knife stuck in his throat and a dog bite on his arm. She looked down at me, "Put that knife in his brain for me..." she wheezed before fainting. Her face glowed red with fresh punches, her lips bled, her eyes swelled. Bambi rushed inside, her gun out of ammo, she closed the door and began to barricade. "There's only a few left." She said.

I slammed the hatched into the biker's brain and pulled it out. I took the knife from his throat and cleaned it as I climbed the stairs.

Oliver stumbled out of the bedroom he and Emily were shooting from and knelt beside her, a small hole in his chest; he bared his teeth and ripped into her shoulder. The air went out of me.

She woke up screaming. I ran and cut his head in half with the hatchet. I put my hand on her wound. Everything turned red.


	14. Chapter 14: The Orchard

_CHAPTER FOURTEEN:_

_THE ORCHARD_

The grass rushed in a blur beneath my feet as I ran down the aisle between the apple trees. I hid in a tiny crevice behind a dew covered brush. The sun broke through summer white clouds and everything was shimmering green. A single engine plane hummed across the blue sky above dragging behind it a banner for a new real estate company. The sounds of cars on the highway rose and fell away again like waves in a far off shore. I was as quiet as a little boy could be while hiding from his sister.

"I'll find you little weasel!" her voice bounced in the orchard and faded into the trees.

"Don't call your brother a weasel, that's not a nice nickname." I heard my grandfather say behind her.

"There you are!" She yelled pointing at me through the branches. I shot up and sprinted alongside the Macintosh reds- I had no chance of outrunning Bambi, she ran faster than anyone I'd ever met, and she knew every move I was going to make before I made it. I cut across the the aisle by climbing a tree and jumping off the other side, I don't know how she got so close so fast but there she was; we darted toward the treeline ahead and that's when we heard;

"HEY!" our grandfather yelled in the tone of serious business. "Come back from there!" He ordered. Bambi and I looked at teach other, then ahead of us- all we could see were the trees ahead, but there was a clearing close behind it.

"What's over there?" Bambi asked- he came and took us both by the arms, the only time he ever physically touched us other than to give hugs.

"Never mind what's there, I said don't go that means don't go understand?"

"Yes." We responded in unison. He dragged us away warning that anything past the last brush in the orchard was forbidden.

"...If you go there you can't come back to stay with grandma and me." He said. We knew he wasn't serious, he would never turn us away, but if he was willing to say it we were never going to test it. We agreed the mystery simply wasn't worth the risk. Whatever it was behind those trees, it would have to stay secret; my sister and I were happy enough on the other side side.

Emily had lived through the night. Menace lay beside her on the bed tucked in a melancholy curl. The bite had been dressed but still bled on and off without much consistency. During the night her temperature had begun to rise, now she was little more than fire personified. Her chin vibrated as shivers would prickle their way up to her spine and chills rolled down from it. You don't know what it means to be helpless until you sit by the only person in the world you would die for knowing you can't. They will die, you will you live, and there's nothing to be done about it.

"Do you think she came back?" Emily muttered. She had been talking to herself for a while, it took a minute before I realized she was lucid.

"Who?"

"My mother."

"Came back from where?" I asked. She was lying on her side, her eyes facing the dog; she turned and looked at me "The dead." She said and waited for my response. I was hoping the delirium would keep her away from these kinds of thoughts. I wanted her to go somewhere else in her mind, back home to a time when everything was okay and everyday was the same. Some place away from here.

"She passed away a long time before all this." I said drying the sweat from her forehead.

"But what if one of them, wandering around out there?"

"She isn't." I pushed loose strands of hair from her face.

"It won't be me anymore you know, when it happens. Don't be afraid." She looked at the gun on the dresser, then closed her eyes and fell asleep. The fever was uncertain, I didn't know if that would be the last thing she ever said to me or if she would wake up again in a few minutes and still know I was there. I went to the bunker for another bottle of water, Em had gone through three of them already.

"How is she?" Bambi asked as she came down the stairs behind me.

"Almost gone." I said and took the water bottle from out of the pack.

"Another one?" Bambi asked, in a tone no less than matter of fact.

"Don't." My hands shook with rage, restrained but absolute.

"You think it's my fault your girlfriend is dying upstairs...?" she looked down- thought about it for a moment, "...Maybe it is. Maybe it's yours for leaving her. The truth is it doesn't matter. You did what you thought was right, and there's no room for remorse, we don't have time to grieve. We endure or we die."

"Emily, Oliver, you, me, we all could have been okay if you had just-"

"If I had left this place."

"Yes!"

"No. We would have died, she would have died like she's dying now. Maybe not today but soon and probably a lot worse than this, at least now you get to be with her while she goes, she wasn't torn to pieces in front of your eyes. It will happen to everyone of us, but while you're here, while you're alive, you fight for what's yours, you kill for what you love."

"You don't know we would die, maybe we could have been okay-"

"There it is."

"What?"

"Hope. I'm sorry little brother, you don't have your head on straight. Hope is gone. You can't even hope to rest in peace after you die anymore, the best thing you can get now is having someone you love blow your brains out before you turn into one of them. There is no hope for something better. There's the dead outside and us in here, and that's all there will ever be again."

Menace whined and barked upstairs- I ran from the bunker taking the stairs four steps at a time- when I got to the bedroom Emily was convulsing on the floor. I held her down and put a loose leather belt between her teeth. She bit down with incredible force until the seizures finally stopped. Her eyes rolled open and she looked past me to someone who wasn't there.

"Daddy?" She said.

"You're okay Em, I have you..." I held her close, not knowing what else to say.

Her eyes found me again, she knew I was there. A smile curved small at the edge of her mouth as she remembered, "I hugged him when he came home from work everyday, his beard was always so scratchy... He swallowed me up in his arms and said daddy loves you, daddy loves you so much..." the smile fell from her face and her eyes grew wide with confusion, "Why did he hurt me?" she asked, and then she was gone.

The windows are all caked with ice now. More snow is starting to fall, the cold is so that my hands shake as I punch the keys. My ribbon is almost out of ink, there isn't much time left. Menace lies beside me now licking clean the last can of food we have. I won't let him starve, she wouldn't have wanted that. I said when I started that I was writing this as a cautionary tale. So that you who finds this won't make the same mistakes I did. So you won't have to live your days in the cold, alone with regret. The moment Emily died so did everything that was good in me, and I believed what my sister told me. To survive this world, you have to do the hard thing, the cold thing. Bambi said there was no hope left, she said you have to kill for what you love, and I believed her.

I buried Emily in the orchard behind the house. The ground was getting thick but I could still dig. She was wrapped up in sheets and blankets, I lay an apple seed in the grave with her. I knew it wouldn't grow, at least not yet. But it was all I had. There were no flowers, nothing to make her beautiful again. There was only me and the cold dead wind blowing through the trees. I walked without aim or care, following the aisles that made up the only good parts of my childhood. When I reached the end, I found the forbidden line we were never meant to cross. That day I finally broke the promise I had made to my grandparents. When I did, I knew why we weren't meant to come here. I knew why this was the only place in the farm that had to be kept hidden us. In the clearing beyond the trees there was another, smaller orchard. This is where they grew the strawberries.


End file.
